Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away.
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/Open linkView original on lemmy.world275
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It would be nice if FTC or someone would sue them for anticompetitive behavior.
And, you know, broke them up into many smaller companies.
I wonder to what extent this will help, in the case of YouTube? Its so dominant of that market. Is it purely fiscal or also technical?
It probably would help, as Google couldn’t connect their advertising services that easily with YouTube, and both parties would have to be more independent.
Youtube is a money pit. If it had to split from Google, they will need to up monitization pronto or shut down. While I do want Google broken like Bane cracking Batman, there will be casualities. Too many parts of our internet infrastructure exist via subsidization and we use them like utilities. It is going to be messy out there if the FTC succeeds.
There are two US antitrust cases against Google right now:
The first is related to things like paying to be the default search engine on iPhone, Firefox, etc. The second is related to ad tech. Neither really directly addresses the issues that average people have with Google's behavior though, so keep filing complaints!
Small government has entered the chat
Wow, small government has enough time off from banning books and limiting rights to enter the chat?
I’m not sure I follow.
Wanting to archive the resources I found:
uBlock Origin has managed to reduce the delay in loading by a bit
Ugh, Google just gets worse and worse...
Actually, this isn't the first time they did it. There was a thread by a mozilla ex-employee that described how Google destroyed Firefox's market share using the same dirty trick.
Thread can be read on this article.
— Chris Peterson (@cpeterso) July 24, 2018
According to that article,
while Firefox was still a Google search partner.
EDIT: Did not realize how long ago this post was made, whoops.
Adblocks are really fucking them over and it's gratifying seeing chrome uninstalls peaking rn.
I've been noticing this for a while now. I chalked it up to YouTube having ugly code, but now I see that it is simply malicious code.
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence*.
there's no slowdowns on freetube either
Yeah. Going with freetube desktop app (flatpak) on Linux.
No slowdown here.
Makes sense and improves privacy but they're not going to win on speed, not even on Firefox, unless you host a private instance or use a nearby-hosted one.
Just install the chameleon add on and set it to chrome. Problem solved.
This doesn't have any impact on video load times on Piped, does it?
Why would it? I don't think your browser makes any direct connection to youtube.com when using Piped, all goes through a proxy server of your choice (hence the name).
Just checking
Is this a violation of net neutrality? They are effectively not treating all traffic equally.
All current conversations surrounding Net Neutrality refer to ISPs being neutral. Since this is happening at the browser level, it would not technically be a violation.
For example streaming websites aren't required to support Linux. It's a dick move, but it's not a violation to "block" users.
That isn't to say this isn't a dick move, it absolutely is, but as currently defined it isn't a Net Neutrality issue.
Hmm, perhaps not net neutrality then, but it could be anti competitive maybe. Like the Internet Explorer fiasco from back in the day.
I don't notice this, Firefox on Mac, YouTube Premium. Do they only do this for YouTube Free? Yep, seems like it. Terrible nonetheless of course but it explains why I never experienced this.
You can also use poptube on ios. Thats what I use.
POPTube or PopTube?
POPTube.
It's a little weird because its definitely slower on my desktop but on my laptop (with the same account, browser, and extensions) it's perfectly fine. I'm guessing that there's some AB testing going on.